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The AIX Virtual User Group continues its impressive lineup of speakers. This month Janel Barfield stepped through Partition Creation Settings . She covered plenty of aspects of the menus in the HMC where you create a logical partition, including the most misunderstood aspect of LPAR creation: Virtual Processors . Here are my rough transcripts of some important sections which were addressed. The first one comes in at about 19:40 into the presentation recording and deals with the concern many people have of assigning too many virtual processors... [More]

Rob McNelly in this week's AIXchange blog spoke of the IBM Systems Director Management Console (SDMC). This is the successor to the Hardware Management Console (HMC) and the Integrated Virtualization Manager (IVM), and shows how IBM Systems Director is going to take an increasingly important role for administrators. Replace groan with grin I understand that the take up of Systems Director in the AIX world hasn't been that strong. Many people have had bad experiences, especailly with earlier versions and learning to navigate the Director... [More]

A strange "insufficient memory" error on the VIO server took a little bit of untangling. The error occurred when I logged into the VIO server command line as padmin shortly after running a backup. I was attempting to display the Virtual Media Library* contents. When I entered the lsrep command , it reported the following error: Insufficient memory, not able to complete command. I tried to list the virtual resources using the HMC GUI ( Server > Virtual Resources > Virtual Storage Management ) but it seemed to take an eternity. It... [More]

Many people love using SMIT but find its editing functionality a little cumbersome. So here are some editinig tips you should find useful, and you may not have been aware of: If you want to wipe out the value you have entered, you can delete to the end of the field by using Ctrl-k (that's holding down the Ctrl key and pressing the k ). To delete a single character, use Ctrl-x . To go down a page at a time, press Ctrl-v To go up a page, use Esc-v . The tab key allows you to toggle through true / false fields such as yes / no fields or some... [More]

IBM recently issued a Technote explaining the very handy NOLOG option which you can use when mounting JFS2 (also known as Enhanced Journaled File Systems). The NOLOG feature was added in AIX 6.1 and it only applies to JFS2, not to the older JFS. If you need to copy or restore data to a file system in a hurry, then
you could mount the target file system with the NOLOG option. This was one of three suggestions I made in an earlier post for when you need to copy data quickly, but the Technote covers the NOLOG more comprehensively than I did in... [More]

When you run some AIX Logical Volume Manager (LVM) commands, the volume group you're working on gets locked. Don't worry. The data is still accessible and users can work away merrily (or grumpily). The lock is put in place to stop other LVM commands which might try to update the same LVM metadata. For example, if you run migratepv to move your data to a new, fast-performing LUN (you hope), you might like to check the state of the volume group (VG). If you try to view the VG while it is locked, you'll get a message such as this:
... [More]